What this is
Food for Thought is a quarterly deep-dive for adults into the stories America would rather skip. Four times a year, one gathering for each season, we come together around books by Black women about food, labor, and power, and we sit with the whole of it: the power, the pain, the joy, and the responsibility that honest history demands.
History doesn't get to be comfortable just because it's over. And cooking doesn't start at the stove.
Who it's for
How it works
What grows
Cooking Starts With Your Thoughts
Most people think cooking begins when the heat comes on. It doesn't. It begins with a thought: who am I feeding, what do I have, what do I remember, and what do I want this meal to say? Every dish is a decision before it is anything else.
Black women have always known this. They planned menus in kitchens they didn't own, stretched what little they were given into something that could feed a family, turned a plate of chicken into a business, and wrote down recipes when no one else thought their knowledge was worth recording. That thinking was the cooking. It was strategy, memory, survival, and art.
Food for Thought is where we practice that kind of cooking. There's no station to stand at and no recipe to follow. The work happens in how you read, what you question, and what you decide to carry forward.
Put the Phone Down. Pick the Book Up.
Consider Food for Thought our version of an anti–brain rot challenge. Scrolling gives you fragments. A book gives you the full story, told by the person who lived it or the person who did the work to find it. Each quarter gives you a full season to read slowly, underline honestly, and come to the table ready.
Your 2027 Journey
February 2027
Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days by Blair LM Kelley
Your Turn to Host: A Guide to Great Parties and Gatherings by Amber Mayfield Hewett
We open with two books in conversation. Kelley traces the Black working class through the lives of the people who cooked, cleaned, carried, and built this country, including her own family. Hewett, an event planner and founder of the supper club To Be Hosted, writes about gathering people so they feel seen and cared for. Together they ask the question that launches the whole program: for generations, Black women did the work of hospitality in other people's homes. What does it mean to claim the table as our own, and whose turn is it to host?
May 2027
Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae Grosvenor
The title names the only days a domestic worker could call her own. Grosvenor writes about the Black women who cooked and kept house for other families, with humor, fury, and a voice that refuses to be quiet about it.
August 2027
Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook by Pamela Strobel
Part cookbook, part testimony, from the woman who ran a legendary Harlem dining room. Her recipes come wrapped in her own words, and her words carry a life most histories never bothered to write down.
November 2027
Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power by Psyche A. Williams-Forson
We close the year with the book that names what Food for Thought is about. Williams-Forson shows how Black women used chicken, one of the most stereotyped foods in American culture, to build economic independence, feed communities, and push back against the images used to diminish them. Food was never just food. It was power.
Your Seat Is Waiting
Food for Thought is open to everyone, and we've built a scholarship into the program so the table reflects the whole community. Every seat, whether in the room or on the screen, is hosted with the same intention and care.
Four seasons. Five books. One question worth carrying all year: what did it take to put this food on the table, and who made it possible?
Available now
Nothing open today. The program is still active.
New cohorts will appear here as soon as applications open.
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